Response to Chapter 7: Important Skills for Learning

by April

I thought it was interesting that you mentioned diversity in regards to elaboration. I wrote in my margins in the Diversity section that I wondered if there's a connection between the issue of elaboration and differing cultural capital, causing some of what we're seeing in regards to minority students struggling in school. Do minority students struggle to learn because the ways we present new knowledge is often not something they have previous experience with or knowledge of? I think you're right to say that we need to provide multiple representations of content in order to help minority students elaborate on new knowledge.

When you mentioned "modeling metacognitive skills" it made me think of our orientation when someone said that just because a person is a good teacher, doesn't mean they will make a good mentor. This is often because expert teachers can't always explain their thinking because it has become to natural to them. Being able to model our thinking skills is important and something we need to be aware of. I think it was our Psych book that talked about working out a problem out loud so students can "observe" how you think through something. I think it can be very hard to break down thinking processes that come so automatically to us, however, we should practice this skill so that we can help our students do the same.

I also noticed the differing opinions on memorization. I completely understand how just teaching in a way that promotes rote memorization is not helpful for students in the long run. They will learn for a test and quickly forget. I think we both mentioned in our last entry that we did this in school. But I agree with you, memorization was helpful for some things, such as spelling tests. I was thinking about this a couple weeks ago about math skills. I was trying to think about how you would teach multiplication tables in a meaningful way rather than through rote memorization. I didn't come up with any ideas. Perhaps a combination is helpful. We help students memorize multiplication tables and then we give them meaningful tasks to practice them. I suppose we'll learn more in our math methods courses!